Midnight: My players wonder--What's the point?

[hong]

Clearly, we each want something else from our games. Fair enough, it's all good. For me, the journey is more important than the destination. And like someone else mentioned, who's to say it's hopeless. After all, the Big Bad is only one for three so far against the forces of good, and he still hasn't managed a flawless victory.

And why does victory over the darkness have to be the only objective? To paraphrase Cyrano de Bergerac, a man doesn't always fight for victory.

Ultimately, it either works for you or it doesn't. If it doesn't, no amount of prozelytizing on my part is going to change your mind, and no amount of naysaying on yours is going to change mine.

Yet again, I proffer the wisdom of _Robin's Laws of Good GMing_:

The vast majority of successful roleplaying games are power fantasies. They give players the chance to play characters vastly more competent than themselves -- or, for that matter anyone else in the world as we know it. In power fantasy, PCs always have a good chance of vanquishing their foes; in some games, players can even assume that their enemies will be conveniently distributed by threat level. The power fantasy lies at the very heart of the adventure genre, in books and movies as well as in games. It offers a generally optimistic view of life. There's no shame in embracing this fantasy, and GMs who embrace and understand it tend to keep players longer than those who don't.
...
A few games offer fantasies of powerlessness, in which PCs can expect to be buffeted about by a hostile world dominated by unbeatable enemies. Horror games, especially Call of Cthulhu, come to mind here. The surreal conspiracy game Over the Edge ... provides another example. You need a special group to sustain a campaign in a game that withholds many of the standard pleasures of the roleplaying experience... they attract method actors and storytellers but tend to drive off tacticians, buttkickers and casual gamers.

 

[Vyper]

Anyway, I guess my issue with Midnight is that, as written, there isn't any real hope of making people's lives better, and there are no rewards.

I don't think that is true. You can basically have the same adventures that you have in a "normal" campaign.

Just a few examples:
- There was a battle near a human settlement. Some undead rose from the corpses and are heading towards that settlement. I don't think, the citizens will reject the group's offer for help. Of course, the heroes have to get away quickly after they saved the town, because Izrador will soon send monsters to hunt them down. But the majority of the citizens of the town will (secretly) be grateful.

- The Legates (clerics of Izrador) are very intriguing. They do nearly everything to get a higher rank. Their extreme egoism gives the players lots of opportunities to really change something, affecting the lives of hundreds of people.

- The heroes could try to destroy one of the Black Mirrors. This is an exciting mission for mid to high level characters and really hurts Izrador.

- Try to get into a dwarfen keep in the Kaladrun Mountains to find some legendary magical weapon or something. Might be fun, too, because the dwarves are actually on the good side, but they have become paranoid and getting to them means going through a lot deadly traps, ambushs and so on.

- Free some slaves that are tortured by a group of sadistic orcs.

All this isn't too different to other adventures in other campaigns. The PCs are not getting the fame here and have to keep underground, but besides that there are plenty of rewarding adventures I can think of.

 

[d20Dwarf]

Yet again, I proffer the wisdom of _Robin's Laws of Good GMing_:

Robin speaks well, but I think Midnight is a bridge product that has something for the tacticians and buttkickers as well as the actors and playwrights. It also provides a context for moral exploration in the game. That's what has made it special.

 

[hong]

Robin speaks well, but I think Midnight is a bridge product that has something for the tacticians and buttkickers as well as the actors and playwrights. It also provides a context for moral exploration in the game. That's what has made it special.

You can do moral exploration in any setting. You don't even need to work especially hard to do it. Sometimes it pops up even when you don't want it to.

 

[Epametheus]

What's odd about the CoC setting is that it isn't completely hopeless. Sure, one day in the distant future, the Great Old Ones will return to claim that which is theirs. But even Lovecraft's stories contradict the notion of complete human helplessness. Randolph Carter reaches Unknown Kadath and escapes the wrath of Nyarlathotep. The professors of Miskatonic succeed in banishing the Dunwich Horror. Joseph Curwen is returned to dust. Great Cthulhu himself blows his opportunity at ressurrection when a ship gets plowed right through his head.

Humanity may not be able to win the war, but they sure as hell can win battles, and can win some pretty impressive ones. The Necronomicom is horribly dangerous and possesses great potential for evil, but it may well be the best weapon that humanity has.

Unfortunately, is does sound like Midnight is set after the rise of the Great Old Ones. It doesn't sound that good for people who like their campaigns to involve challenging great evils and actually winning.

 

[Krieg]

Except that the campaign setting makes it clear that you cannot overthrow the evil powers. Ever. Sadly, I think that no matter how cool some of the ideas in Midnight are, this basic premise is what I have an insurmountable problem with. I think the peasants are right in this case. The best one can hope for is to go unnoticed, and live out one's short life in anonymous wretchedness.

In which case, I might as well set my game in Afghanistan.

Actually that's not what they say at all. They merely state that the players are not going to be able to kill Izrador himself. BIG difference.

Life managed to go on pretty much normally for millenia after the sundering & before the final war.

Just because the dark god cannot be killed does not mean that his servants, followers & forces are similarly safe...

 

[Nifelhein]

I would also like to point that there is only ONE god in midnight and it has no cody, his essence is trrapped in the world, that makes defeat even more difficult.

As for the war that was won, i doubt you can say that, okay the book says so a hundered times, but when you read it all you see that the last war was won against an enemy that hasn't even defended himself: The Humans were already in many internal wars and corruption was everywhere.

The war is still going on, Elves and Dwarves are fighting day and night against Izrador's minions, to say the war is won is what the shadow would like and what the humans believe, but not what most elves think.

Okay, the dwarven and elven most respected and wise personalities may even believe that they will never win, but that is while nothing changes, they have lost hope because they don't see anyway they can make the tides change!

My job, as a DM and as a STORYTELLER, is to make hope spark inside the world again, showing there are other ways and the war can be won, that can be almost impossible and very unlikely, but that is where the PCs go, they are there to fight against all odds and maybe, for they will have to actually deserve it, they will turn the tides...

Not to say that a 4th war cannot be done, but after three i would guess dwarves and elves would want to make a great push on orcs, for the lower their number the unlikely they will rise again...

Anyway, the survival thing is what makes me think: Would I like a game where every meal must be roleplayed and rollplayed for? The answer is no, but once in a while or at justified times it would be not just interesting, but important.

I have talked to my players about this world a lot and still will in a major session that is for nothing else than: what do you want of the game? what you wouldnt accept to be pushed too far, and so on and so forth.

I am not a teenager playing a game out of my mind, i am a very experienced gamer making up a story with my friends, my task is to make a main sotryline, they will change as they can and see fit, my game is not one against another, it is all together to have fun and very exciting memories for many years to come.

 

[Neo]

The point of Midnight I would say is to make a difference, not necessarily to win or save the world.. this isn't Lord of the Rings afterall and the Big Bad has already won.
Mostly its just damage control, trying to make things a little better for as many as possible with as few repercussions as possible and moving on and starting the process again without fanfare or acknowledgement.. true heroism in the truest sense of the word.

 

[d20Dwarf]

Unfortunately, is does sound like Midnight is set after the rise of the Great Old Ones. It doesn't sound that good for people who like their campaigns to involve challenging great evils and actually winning.

Evil is everywhere, therefore you can't fight evil?

There is plenty of evil to be challenged and defeated in Midnight....that is the whole point of the setting.

If you mean killing evil and taking its stuff so that you can buy magic items and rule kingdoms.....then you're right, it's not for you.

Defeating evil in this setting means a whole lot more than it does in other settings. It might just be more sophisticated than some people want to deal with, which I can understand (I'm looking at you, hong).

 

[Pbartender]

Pardon me for changing the subject a little, but...

It's discussions like this that have gotten me interested in several campaign settings. Most notably and most recently: Midnight and Freeport. Unfortunately, I haven't the cash to purchase much of either at the moment, and so am unfamiliar with either, except for what I can find online.

What particularly interests me with these two settings, is that the rare-magic mechanics of Midnight would seem to suit the late-renaissance piratey swashbuckling feel of a setting like Freeport. I have dreams of mixing the two to create an alternate-earth setting during the 16th and 17th centuries... Colonialism and pirates, witch hunts and inquisitions, explorers and lost civilizations, flintlocks and cutlasses... And so on.

Any thoughts on how well they'd work together?